If C is so evil why is it so successful?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

       > From: Alfred M. Szmidt

       > No even the following program:
       >   int main (void) { return 0; }
       > is guaranteed to work

   I'm missing something: why not?

It boils down to pedantism.  The encoding of the above is ASCII, and
the encoding type of a C program is implementation defined.  The other
thing is that the abstract machine defined in C can be utterly bogus,
i.e. not capable of executing anything due to various implementation
specified environment limitations.


Ofcourse, this is all academic ... and I don't know any such idiotic
implementation.